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Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

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Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#71

Post by nazgulnarsil »

consonants wrote: post #49
fexl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "money laundering" originally referred to the practice of concealing the movement of funds involved in a crime. Now they've redefined it so that concealing the movement of funds is itself a crime, even if the funds are entirely legitimate and no other crime is involved.

Yes, because the motivations behind money laundering are driven almost exclusively by crime. For purchases you wish to remain private, such as personally embarrassing products, there are 'anonymizing' but traceable services for you to save face with. There are very few legitimate reasons to be concealing where you money came from or is going from the IRS, and they well aware of the intent behind the actions.

>There are very few legitimate reasons to be concealing where you money came from or is going from the IRS, and they well aware of the intent behind the actions

Nice circular reasoning. Because everything that the IRS would disapprove of is illegitimate? When did the IRS get ultimate moral authority?

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#72

Post by dllthomas »

josephagoss wrote: post #7
cheez wrote: post #2

This is why I can't take Bitcoin seriously. The privacy implications are insane.

Please stop with the privacy scaremongering. A lot of work is currently going into trustless mixing/anonymising services that will largely stop this type of tracking. (coinjoin/zerocoin) A lot of us are investing with the expectation true anonymous transactions eventually happen, because when they do Bitcoin will become even more valuable.

You mean trustless mixing/anonymising services that will largely get you brought up on money-laundering charges.

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#73

Post by logicallee »

maxerickson wrote: post #53
logicallee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some simple examples from this site, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404362 - "Hackers Steal, Encrypt Health Records and Hold Data for Ransom". and recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6567735 - "You’re infected—if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins" A top comment on that article said: It actually made my skin crawl reading about it. Never had that reaction to such a stor…

Data ransom shouldn't ever happen to valuable data. Preventing single points of failure is much more important than chasing around the bad actors that come along and exploit them. Run of the mill kidnappings are parents violating custody agreements. Infrastructure needs to be resilient in any case. I don't mind that bitcoin has a public ledger, but you haven't convinced me it is particularly important.

Agree, shouldn't happen. Does anyway, with high risk, medium reward to perps. Lower risk, higher reward = more of it.

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#74

Post by dllthomas »

tracker1 wrote: post #62
shock-value wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory yes, but as the linked blog-post shows, Bitcoin---in its current state anyway---likely isn't truly anonymous either (ostensibly due to its transactional records being public).

If you create a new wallet.. coins sent to that wallet, a person may know where the coins came from (because of other transactions to their wallet), they don't know for certain that the new wallet is you.. In the case of the article, the reason it's suspected, not even confirmed, is simply because the number of wallets coins were coming from were identified as the same source. It's definitely more anonymous than wire…

Yeah, my gauge reads "more anonymous than wire transfers or credit cards, less anonymous than cash". Hard to send cash digitally, though.

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#75

Post by superuser2 »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #71
consonants wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because the motivations behind money laundering are driven almost exclusively by crime. For purchases you wish to remain private, such as personally embarrassing products, there are 'anonymizing' but traceable services for you to save face with. There are very few legitimate reasons to be concealing where you money came from or is going from the IRS, and they well aware of the intent behind the actions.

>There are very few legitimate reasons to be concealing where you money came from or is going from the IRS, and they well aware of the intent behind the actions Nice circular reasoning. Because everything that the IRS would disapprove of is illegitimate? When did the IRS get ultimate moral authority?

IRS doesn't care what the money is from or for, only that Uncle Sam gets what he's owed. Income from criminal enterprises is not special: you have to pay taxes on it like everything else. The source of the income is kind of don't-ask-don't-tell.

Spending on sex toys is not special, unless the national security apparatus (or more likely your competitor in the private sector) already has a reason to try to discredit you. Which is a valid concern for activists, but not most people.

Investigations and enforcement actions by the IRS have nothing to do with the morality of your checking account statement and everything to do with tax evasion.

The largest threat to your financial privacy is private enterprise. Underwriters, prospective employers, and others with a financial stake in your "good behavior" are the most interested in judging the moral acceptability/health/prudence of your financial choices.

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#76

Post by jamestnz »

joshguthrie wrote: post #70

Today's goals: * Spend 100 million for supercomputers to compute this address's wallet in one day. * Acquire said wallet. * Reimburse my 100 million debt. * Enjoy my 50 millions. Anybody got supercomputers?

The numbers for this, sadly (or gladly, for holders of bitcoin), don't work out. Even if you had the most powerful supercomputer in the world and could try trillions upon trillions of keys per second, you'd need, on average, more than the current age of the universe to brute-force the key.

From: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/22/is-it-possible...

In order to spend money sent to a Bitcoin address, you just need to find a ECDSA public key that hashes to the same 160 bit value. That will take, on average, 2 ^ 160 key generations.

Supposing you could generate a billion (2 ^ 30) per second, you need 2 ^ 130 seconds.

Doing this in parallel using a billion machines requires only 2 ^ 100 seconds.

Getting a billion of your richest friends to join you gets it down to only 2 ^ 70 seconds.

There are about 2 ^ 25 seconds per year, so you need 2 ^ 45 years.

The age of the Universe is about 2 ^ 34 years so far—better get cracking!

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#77

Post by danneu »

fhars wrote: post #55
fragsworth wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As it stands truly anonymous and private transactions on Bitcoin are apparently impossible. Not true. There are many, many schemes that can be built into the protocol or on top of it to make transactions anonymous. Rather than hastily choosing one, it's probably better to wait for a really good scheme to surface. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241.0

If we have to wait for a scheme to surface, that does maen that as it stands truly anonymous and private transactions on Bitcoin are currently impossible, right?

Right now, you and I and our friends could sign our transactions so that nobody can tell which outputs correspond to which inputs. What's missing is that it's not widely distributed in a major client where everyone will partake by default.

Until then, it's opt-in, a hassle, with a small pool of anonymity. But "impossible" isn't the word I'd use to describe the scenario.

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#78

Post by meowface »

rheide wrote: post #14

I wonder if it ever becomes viable to try to brute-force the private key of such a valuable address, rather than devoting the brute force power to mining. Edit: got curious and found an answer: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-wou... If I understand correctly, it's still not viable even if you tried your brute-forced keys on all addresses in the network.

It's completely infeasible (without quantum computers anyway).

However, in cases where the private key is generated from a hash of a passphrase, like brainwallets, then it is far more feasible. There are people running bruteforcers constantly looking for private keys corresponding to brainwallet passphrases; that's their form of "mining".

To test it, if you make a brainwallet with a password of "password" and then send 0.01 BTC into your account, you'll see it vanish in a few minutes (or a few seconds).

Re: Here’s who probably did that $150 million Bitcoin transaction

#80

Post by [deleted] »

meowface wrote: post #78
rheide wrote: post #14

I wonder if it ever becomes viable to try to brute-force the private key of such a valuable address, rather than devoting the brute force power to mining. Edit: got curious and found an answer: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-wou... If I understand correctly, it's still not viable even if you tried your brute-forced keys on all addresses in the network.

It's completely infeasible (without quantum computers anyway). However, in cases where the private key is generated from a hash of a passphrase, like brainwallets, then it is far more feasible. There are people running bruteforcers constantly looking for private keys corresponding to brainwallet passphrases; that's their form of "mining". To test it, if you make a brainwallet with a password of "password" and then se…

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